Love Hurts

“Les Misérables,” “Django Unchained,” and “Amour.”

The grandeur of “Les Misérables” may have confused the director’s sense of scale.Credit Illustration by Istvan Orosz

The long and thunderous film of “Les Misérables” arises from the stage musical, which itself was adapted from Victor Hugo’s enormous novel. Yet the story, at heart, is an intimate one. Valjean (Hugh Jackman) serves nineteen years for stealing a loaf of bread: a punishment that he regards as unjust, though in fact it reflects well on the status of French baking. Had he taken a croissant, it would have meant the guillotine. In 1815, he breaks parole, vanishes, and emerges eight years later as a respectable factory owner and the mayor of Montreuil. There he is dimly recognized as a former convict by Javert (Russell Crowe), the local police inspector. These two cross paths for the rest of the film, with Javert in panting pursuit. Would it be too fanciful to suggest that they have a thing for each other, to which they never confess? That would explain why Crowe and Jackman, both tough Australians, are made to sing at so agonized a pitch. Crowe launches into his lusty anthems as if a platoon of infantry, stationed in his immediate rear, had just fixed bayonets without giving sufficient warning.

Then, there is a layer of lesser plots. A poor wench named Fantine (Anne Hathaway), one of Valjean’s workers, loses her job, becomes a prostitute, and dies, though not before summoning enough puff to sing “I Dreamed a Dream.” She leaves a daughter, whom Valjean raises as his own. We jump to 1832, with Paris in a rebellious mood and the child, Cosette (Amanda Seyfried), all grown up. She draws the gaze of Marius (Eddie Redmayne), a young hothead, who, in turn, is the idol of his neighbor Éponine (Samantha Barks). And so the action gathers steam and comes to the barricades—or, to be exact, to a single barricade, with an anti-monarchist uprising represented by a small group of students sitting on a pile of furniture. The director is Tom Hooper, fresh from “The King’s Speech,” and you can’t help wondering if this shift into grandeur has confused his sense of scale. The camera soars on high, the orchestra bellows, and then, whenever somebody feels a song coming on, we are hustled in close, forsaking our bird’s-eye view for that of a consultant rhinologist.

The actors were recorded live as they belted out the big numbers, and Hathaway, in particular, takes full advantage, turning in precisely the sort of performance, down to the last sniff, that she would be the first to lampoon on “Saturday Night Live.” Not that you can blame her. She probably took one look at the material and realized that the only way to survive it was by the naked power of oomph. I was unprepared, having missed “Les Misérables” onstage, for the remarkable battle that flames between music and lyrics, each vying to be more uninspired than the other. The lyrics put up a good fight, but you have to hand it to the score: a cauldron of harmonic mush, with barely a hint of spice or a note of surprise. Some of Hooper’s cast acquit themselves with grace, notably Redmayne, and it’s a relief to see Sacha Baron Cohen, in the role of a seamy innkeeper, bid goodbye to Cosette with the wistful words “Farewell, Courgette.” One burst of farce, however, is not enough to redress the basic, inflationary bombast that defines “Les Misérables.” Fans of the original production, no doubt, will eat the movie up, and good luck to them. I screamed a scream as time went by.

The new Quentin Tarantino picture, “Django Unchained,” stars Jamie Foxx as a slave named Django, and mid-nineteenth-century America as the chains. Our hero is freed by Dr. Schultz (Christoph Waltz), a bounty hunter posing as a dentist, who appears to have escaped from a Buñuel film; trim of beard and florid of rhetoric, he would rather die than act uncivilly, and would rather kill than prolong an unsavory argument. He needs Django as a witness, to identify potential targets, and the pair become a team, dispatching wanted men and handing over the corpses for cash.

The first half of the tale is skillfully balanced, the best thing that Tarantino has done since “Jackie Brown,” and its comedy bristles with barbs. To watch a posse of marauding Klansmen, hooded with white bags, complain that they can’t see through the eyeholes is to wish dearly that D. W. Griffith, who lauded the Klan in “The Birth of a Nation,” were at one’s side. But something happens to the pace and the poise of “Django Unchained” as the hunters head South and the screen fills with the word “Mississippi.” Here resides Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio), slave owner, brocaded fop, and master of Candyland, the plantation estate where his subjects toil, among them Broomhilda (Kerry Washington), Django’s wife. But is Tarantino truly engaged with those subjects? He is happy to film whippings, in unstinting detail, or the incarceration of Broomhilda, whom Django has come to save. Yet she barely exists as a character, and even Django seems to morph from a near-silent sufferer into an avenging angel, grinning in glory, without passing through the usual stages of personhood. What really grips Tarantino is the chance to bait us, as he has done before, with metronomic mentions of the N-word—uttered with especial relish by Stephen (Samuel L. Jackson), the majordomo of Candyland, and the most terrifying of Uncle Toms.

The reason for the crawl and slither of these later scenes is plain: the director is coiling himself, as is his wont, for an apocalypse of blood. Dr. Schultz triggers it with one brief deed. “I couldn’t resist,” he says, and that mix of mock-apology and merry boast is purest Tarantino. He has such a fine eye, and his travelling shots of horses and riders are a hint of what tremendous cowboy flicks he might have made, in a straighter age, but his films continue to be snared in a tangle of morality and style. Tarantino is dangerously in love with the look of evil, and all he can counter it with is cool—not strength of purpose, let alone goodness of heart, but simple comeuppance, issued with merciless panache. That is what Django delivers, and it’s the least that Candie deserves, together with other defenders of the Southern status quo: such, at any rate, will be the claim of Tarantino’s fans, although I was disturbed by their yelps of triumphant laughter, at the screening I attended, as a white woman was blown away by Django’s gun. By the time Tarantino shows up as a redneck with an unexplained Australian accent, “Django Unchained” has mislaid its melancholy, and its bitter wit, and become a raucous romp. It is a tribute to the spaghetti Western, cooked al dente, then cooked a while more, and finally sauced to death.

Apart from a short scene at a piano recital, and a bus ride home, the whole of Michael Haneke’s “Amour” unfolds inside that home. Far from being claustrophobic, it is a place where happiness has taken root and bloomed: a placid Parisian apartment, lined with bookshelves, and inhabited by Georges (Jean-Louis Trintignant) and his wife, Anne (Emmanuelle Riva). If there is a prison here (and we should expect no less, from the director of “Funny Games” and “The White Ribbon”), it is that of the human body. The couple are elderly, and when, at breakfast, Anne stops still—freeze-framed, we learn, by “obstruction of the carotid”—the moment marks the start of her entrapment. In vain will she beat against the bars.

To give away what happens in “Amour” is no big deal, because it happens to everyone. It is the coming attraction that we dread, and from which cinema, by and large, has turned its face, just as Anne, her condition worsening, flinches from a mirror. To an extent, she is lucky—she is not alone in her decline, and after an operation she returns in a wheelchair to be looked after by Georges. Her movement is restricted on one side; speech falters and dies to a moan; diapers are required. He gives her spoonfuls of puréed food, as if she were a child. Their daughter, Eva (Isabelle Huppert), comes to visit, and the mere clop of her heels on the wooden floor spells drama and distress, which exasperates her father, who never weeps, and who occupies himself solely with the duties of care. “Your concern is no use to me,” he says to Eva.

You know that he’s right, yet there is a discernible thread of steel in his attitude, as sharp as the cutting of the film, and what makes “Amour” so strong and clear is that it allows Haneke to anatomize his own severity. Anne, for example, used to teach piano, and, for a few tender seconds, we see her play Schubert in Georges’s imagination. Then we think of “The Piano Teacher” (2001), in which Haneke’s heroine was led by a musical rapport into a lethal amour fou. Does the new film redeem such horror, or is all beauty fated to be ominous and frail? It was a masterstroke to cast Riva, whose sweetness of face and manner is as unfaded as that of any actress alive. We instinctively believe, as Georges does of Anne, that she should abide forever. But she will not. There have been many invasions in Haneke’s work, and there is indeed an attempted break-in at the start of this film, but nothing compares with the looming approach of mortality. Even Georges’s resources are of no avail, and that is why he is forced to consider, at the last gasp, what love requires him to do. All amour is fou. ♦